Kindness for Weakness (2 page)

A dirt trail at the back of the gym parking lot leads me to the train tracks, where I can walk the rails to kill time. I go heel to toe for a hundred feet or so, until I lose my balance and fall off. The trestle is raised about ten feet, which gives me a good view of all the backyards and parking lots I pass by. At the Dunkirk Ice Cream plant, a worker in a white smock and a hairnet leans against the factory’s
corrugated yellow siding, smoking a cigarette. He gives me a nod, and then stubs out his butt before returning to work.

Ahead I see a bunch of kids throwing rocks at the old Brooks Locomotive Works, a low-slung brick building that stretches forever on a street that runs parallel to the tracks. The small square windowpanes are long gone; the kids chuck fist-sized trestle stones into the factory through the empty frames. They watch me carefully and, when I get too close, drop their rocks and disappear on bicycles.

I’m getting hungry and tired, so I decide to stop for a rest. I dig out my change: seven pennies, two nickels, and a quarter. It’s not enough to buy anything with, so I put the coins on top of one of the rails and sit down to wait for the next train. Louis and I used to do this, up until he started high school. Those were some of the good times in our lives, before our mother fell apart and started dating Ron. We used to spend hours lining up a hundred pennies at a time on each rail. They’d stretch out forever, an endless line of gleaming copper dots. Later, after they were flattened to the size of half-dollars, Louis would sell them at school for a quarter apiece. We’d go right after to the movie theater to buy tickets, and candy, and giant buckets of buttered popcorn.

Waiting, I look at a scrim of weeds separating the trestle from the road. It has trapped all kinds of garbage: pop cans, scratch tickets, and shredded bits of newspaper; pizza boxes, empty forty-ounce bottles of malt liquor, half of a Nerf football. I sit down with my back against the telephone pole and spot a whole new cache of debris: a pretzeled bicycle wheel, half a waterlogged porno magazine,
and the colored plastic shards of what might have been a squirt gun. How many kids, I wonder, have come to this place to throw rocks, watch trains, and flatten coins on the steel rails? Probably a lot.

After the train thunders by, a double-engine Union Pacific with thirty coal cars, I pick through the rocks on the trestle and find only two pennies. They’re completely smooth and wafer thin, about the size of a quarter. I get back up on the rail and start walking, heel to toe, heel to toe, turning one of the big smooth pennies in my fingers. Maybe I’ll give it to Louis, and he’ll remember the old times when we had fun together.

After a few hours of walking, I meet Louis in the parking lot of Taco Bell on Bennett Road. He’s waiting in his blue and white Bronco, eating a bag of burritos. The Bronco is his pride and joy. He’s spent years restoring it, and it is absolutely perfect, with metallic paint, three-piece rims, and a lift kit. Not that I know anything about trucks, but Louis tells me, and I try to listen because he’s smart, and tough, and good-looking, a guy who is going places. Someday I am going to look in the mirror and see someone more like him than me. Someone with cool clothes and muscles instead of ratty sweatshirts and a bony fifteen-year-old frame. Someone with confidence, and that hard look in the eyes that commands respect, maybe even a little bit of fear.

“You’re late,” Louis says, stuffing his mouth with the last bite, which makes me sad, because I half hoped he had bought me something. He crumples the bag and turns over the small-block eight-cylinder engine. The sound is a deep rumble that runs through my body. It makes me feel tough
and invincible, which is funny, since I think of myself as being mostly weak and breakable (because I’m no good at sports, I bruise at the slightest touch, and I can’t fight or stand up for myself). But it’s good to drive around with my big brother, pretending to be different.

“It’s five o’clock,” I say, but Louis points to the digital display outside the bank, which says 5:32.

“My watch must have stopped,” I say.

Louis laughs and taps the side of his head. “You don’t have a watch, genius.”

“Oh, right.”

Louis shakes his head, like he can already tell this isn’t going to work out, like he’s making a mistake in asking me to help him.

He points at the remains of my black eye.

“Did Ron do that?” He clenches his fists, no doubt considering a detour to give my mother’s boyfriend another ass kicking.

“I’m dealing with it.” Which is a total lie, but as much as I’d like Ron to get what’s coming to him, Louis’s probation officer said one more assault charge against Ron and Louis’ll get real prison time.

“Tell me,” Louis says, scratching his square stubbly jaw.

“I have a plan.”

Louis shakes his head. “No, you don’t, James.”

“I do!” But he’s right; I have no plan. The truth is that I’m terrified of Ron, which is partly why I’m never at home. And it’s why I wander around so much. Even when it’s cold and I’m hungry, walking is better than getting my ass beat.

“You’re not going to do shit, and you know it. You’re just a kid.”

“I’m fifteen.” I know how stupid this sounds, but I don’t feel like a kid, at least not like the kind of fifteen-year-old kid who should be hanging out with friends and getting busy with girls. For one thing, I don’t have friends. And there have never been any girls. But the main reason I don’t feel like a regular kid is because I have to worry about so many things. I worry about Louis staying under the cops’ radar. I worry about my mother paying the rent on time so we won’t get evicted again. I worry about what I’m going to eat next, and if I’ll ever have enough money to take a girl out on a date (assuming that there will someday be a girl who would go on a date with me). But my biggest fear is that the world has made up its mind about me: I’m not wanted. I’m out. This is what fills my head when I walk the trestle that cuts through the backyards of other peoples’ lives, people who are wanted. Those who fit in.

“Exactly,” my brother says, like it’s settled. “We’ll talk about this later.”

Louis shifts the truck into gear and peels out. We drive with the stereo blasting “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes, which he says is his own personal anthem and reflects his true kick-ass nature. I don’t have a personal anthem, but I like Louis’s, especially when a convertible full of high school girls pulls up at a red light; they smile and give us these seductive looks that drive me crazy but also make me feel like a fake, because, really, it’s just the truck and the music and Louis’s good looks. Without any of those things, I am just a lonely kid loping along the street with my head down. But right now things are different, because one of the girls looks right at me and blows me a kiss.

I want to freeze the moment and make it last in case I never get another one. I want to feel the impossible warmth of a kiss whispered through the air at a nowhere stoplight. I want to climb into the convertible with a drop-dead smile and say, “Just drive, damn it, because you are all so beautiful, so impossibly beautiful. And there is nothing outside this car except trouble and loneliness, and we owe it to
ourselves to burn through the night with the music playing loud and your hair flying in my face like rivers of silk, until we run out of gas or explode or die of pure happiness.”

But Louis barely notices the girls. He flicks a smoked-to-the-filter cigarette out the window and shakes loose one more. “How’s Mom?” he says.

“Same,” I say, which means that she is still sad and drunk and beaten down, a different woman entirely from the one who used to buy us Legos and Matchbox cars. Before the bartending job (and the lines of shots at closing time—Louis walking her home at two a.m., trying to keep her from lying down or passing out in the neighbors’ front yards), she used to get up early and make us eggs and bacon arranged in smiley faces. She used to sew baseball patches onto our Little League jerseys. Before Ron, she used to call us her good boys and kiss our foreheads, leaving a lipstick ring.

Louis must be thinking these things, too, because the muscles in his face relax along with his attitude. He reaches across the space of the truck’s cab and puts his hand on my shoulder, and I can’t remember the last time someone touched me. I try not to get too sad about this. For a moment at least, Louis is my big brother, the same one who used to put pennies on the tracks and ride me home from baseball practice on the handlebars of his BMX bike and tell me that, if I closed my eyes and put both of my arms out straight, like wings, it would be like flying. “Keep them out,” he’d say in that solid reassuring voice, “and you’ll be king of the world.”

King of the world
, I say to myself now.

But just as quickly Louis changes back, the hard edges returning along with his attitude. I feel the switch even before he takes his hand off my shoulder and downshifts, making the tachometer jump from three thousand to six thousand rpm, into the red zone. He goes back to being Louis the tough guy, Louis the businessman. We stop in front of a run-down double-wide trailer on the outskirts of town. He thrusts a padded mailing envelope into my hands.

“Ready?”

I nod, even though I don’t want to get out of the truck. Who am I kidding? I’m no drug dealer. I’ve seen the kids at school who deal drugs, and I’m not them. They’ve got tattoos, big gold rings, and hundred-dollar sneakers. They know how to fight, and intimidate. People are afraid of them. Nobody’s going to be afraid of me. I’m sure of it.

I want to tell Louis to turn around and get on I-90 west. I want him to drive to Erie, Pennsylvania, and then Cleveland, Chicago, and whatever lies beyond. I want to drive in shifts, pushing the miles until we’re so far away that neither of us recognizes the names of the places on the green metal highway signs, maybe all the way to the ocean or some big mountain range where people live in little wooden cabins and eat at the same country restaurant on Friday nights for steaks or the meatloaf special. We can share an apartment and get jobs, real jobs in factories or stores, or even mowing lawns. I wouldn’t care. The important thing is that we’d be together, just Louis and me. Starting over. Like brand-new people.

But all of this is in my head, wishful thinking. I take the
package from Louis, surprised at how light it is; I wonder what’s in it, if it’s the crystal meth that fucks Ron up so badly and rots his teeth, or if it’s just weed. But in a way I don’t want to know what’s inside, because it doesn’t matter. Louis has never asked me to help before, and this is my big chance. I have to show him that I’ve got enough balls to do it. I can’t screw it up by asking too many questions or getting cold feet.

He notices my hesitation. “I need your help, bro. Vern fucking enlisted. I can’t do this myself.”

I still don’t believe that. Louis probably kicked him out for using their drugs. Or maybe he’s in rehab. But again, I let it go.

“No worries,” I say, opening the door and climbing down.

“Good,” he says, checking his cell.

I stride across the muddy yard to the front door, where a fat guy in a NASCAR T-shirt and a camo cap is waiting. Through a mouthful of chewing tobacco he says, “Who’re you?” He stands behind a ripped screen door, spitting brownish juice into a plastic Gatorade bottle.

“James,” I say.

“I don’t know you. Where’s Vern?”

He looks mean and stupid and twitchy, but I know that Louis is in his truck watching. He won’t let anything bad happen to me, and I want to do a good job for him.

“Not here,” I say, trying to look unafraid. I show him the package.

“Fuck you. Tell Louis this is bullshit.” He reaches
through the ripped part of the screen door and grabs the padded mailer. “Don’t go nowhere,” he says.

I wait, wondering if he’s going to come back with a gun and blow my head off. Or maybe he won’t come back at all and I’ll have to go in after him. Or I’ll have to return to Louis’s truck empty-handed, which seems worse. But after a minute he comes back with a small envelope that he pushes through the torn-up door. I start to open the package even though I don’t know how much money should be in it. But it seems like the right thing to do, check and make sure the guy isn’t cheating my brother.

“Don’t count it, numbnuts!” He spits into his bottle but misses; a line of brown juice hits my jeans. “Don’t you know shit? Get your stupid ass in that truck and don’t come back until you grow some fucking brains.”

The next houses go easy, and I start feeling hopeful because it’s not too hard a job, and I seem to be good at it, saying “hi” to fuckups and burnouts, handing out mailers, and then collecting. Maybe if I earn Vern’s share of the rent, I can move in with Louis. Forget that Louis didn’t take me with him after his first fight with Ron, almost two years ago. And forget that he hasn’t called or spent time with me, except when he’s needed help, like putting the top on his truck or hauling furniture. I can overlook all that stuff if it means getting out of my mother’s place and the nauseating smell of failure, a mix of body odor, smoke, and spilled beer. The possibility of leaving fills me with hope, and I jog to the remaining houses.

After the last delivery, I wait in Louis’s truck while he opens up the envelopes and counts the money. He peels off two twenties.

“This is for you,” he says. “You didn’t do too bad, James, but you can’t take any shit from those assholes. You know what I mean?”

I nod, even though I have no idea what he means. How can I not take shit from 250-pound guys in NASCAR T-shirts? They’re so much bigger and older. Plus they looked crazy, like there was something wrong with them. They talked to me through ripped screen doors and in dark piss-smelling stairwells. I ask Louis, “What do you want me to do if they don’t pay?” I feel like a big pussy for asking, and I can feel the whole thing slipping away—this job, moving out of my mother’s place, having my own money.

But Louis is cool about it. “You tell me.” He flexes a bicep and points at it. “I’ll deal with that shit.”

We both smile. And then we drive to Dimitri’s, by Lake Erie, to eat and hang out, which is something we haven’t done for a long time. Eighteen months and twenty days, to be exact—since Louis moved out. I know the exact amount of time because we switched to a smaller, one-bedroom apartment “to save money.” That’s how come I ended up on the couch.